"Yes, ghosts and goblins, my boy. You don't believe
it?--I do--or I persuade myself I do, which is better. Sometimes I
can see them straddling the chimes when they ring out the hours,
or I catch them peeping out between the slats of the windows away
up near the cross. Very often in the hot afternoons when you are
stretching your lazy body under the tents of the mighty--" (Peter
referred to some friends of mine who owned a villa down on Long
Island, and were good enough to ask me down for a week in August)
"I come up here out of the rush and sit on these old tombstones
and talk to these old fellows--both kinds--the steeple boys and
the old cronies under the sod. You never come, I know. You will
when you're my age."
I had it in my mind to tell him that the inside of a dry tent had
some advantages over the outside of a damp tomb, so far as
entertaining one's friends, even in hot weather, was concerned,
but I was afraid it might stop the flow of his thoughts, and
checked myself.
"It is not so much the rest and quiet that delights me, as the
feeling that I am walled about for the moment and protected;
jerked out of the whirlpool, as it were, and given a breathing
spell.
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